Tag: werewolf

Episode 698: The kind of scene you should be avoiding

Barnabas Collins, old world gentleman extraordinaire, and Julia Hoffman, MD, are helping mysterious drifter Chris Jennings cover up the fact that he is a werewolf, responsible for a great many violent deaths. Lately Chris has started transforming into his lupine shape even on nights when the moon is not full, and this morning they find that he has not changed back even after dawn.

As if that did not present enough difficulty to Julia and Barnabas, one of Chris’ surviving victims is in town. She is his onetime fiancée, Sabrina Stuart. Two years ago, Sabrina saw Chris as the werewolf. She hasn’t told anyone about him, because she hasn’t been able to speak since. Her hair turned white, her skin turned pale, and she has been nearly catatonic.

Others have encountered the werewolf, and none has had this reaction. It’s true that Chris’ cousin Joe had to be taken to a mental hospital after he saw the transformation, but Joe had just been through a very long train of supernaturally induced traumas that had shattered his sensibilities and taken away everything he cared about. Seeing Chris change was just the last step in that process. Sabrina, as we see in a flashback segment today, was fine until she encountered Chris as the werewolf, and she didn’t even see the transformation itself. Yet here she is two years later, unspeaking, immobilized, and wearing the same makeup that Eli Wallach wore as Mr Freeze in the 1960s Batman TV show.

In a comment on Danny Horn’s post about this episode at Dark Shadows Every Day, “Cole” speculates that the show might have meant to tell us that the real reason Sabrina’s condition is less to do with what happened that on night in Chris’ apartment than with her brother and sole caretaker, Ned, played by Roger Davis:

I am once more getting through the Ned/Sabrina scenes thanks to this blog and the comments here; and although I still have to frequently avert my eyes from the screen to hold back the nausea, I keep concentrating on the dialogue while speculating further on JRM’s theory.

It does seem that we– and Julia– might be meant to feel especially concerned by Ned’s refusal to even consider allowing Sabrina to stay at Windcliff. He even says (or, rather, since it is Roger Davis, he SCREAMS), ​”I won’t be separated from her!”

I don’t think his character is meant to be overly suspicious of Julia and Barnabas so the vehemence behind his already rather alarming declaration becomes more baffling unless the viewer concludes he has … extremely unnatural feelings of possessiveness towards sad, PTSD-afflicted Sabrina.

It is almost half as frustrating as it is disturbing because, with any other actors, we would surely know for certain how to interpret these scenes.

We would perhaps recognize that when Sabrina stares pleadingly at Julia once Ned leaves the room, that her muteness is caused as much by her horror at being an ongoing victim of her brother’s unspeakable abuse as by having once witnessed Chris’s transformation into a werewolf. We wouldn’t wonder, instead if the actress, Lisa Richards, is actually pleading with Hall to help her endure Davis’s deliberate act of molesting and assaulting her through out these scenes.

If it wasn’t Roger Davis in this role, we would know who Ned is really meant to be since there is no way any of the other regular male cast members would willingly subject their costars to type of abuse Davis is inflicting on Richards.

If it were … say, Jerry Lacy who was currently playing “Ned Stuart” in a manner even remotely similar to Roger Davis’s ‘interpretation’ of the role, we would recognize at once that the character of Ned is obviously scripted to be an incestuous rapist (and I am sure Lacy would still keep his hands professionally and respectfully away from Lisa Richards’s/”Sabrina’s” breasts, instead using actual acting techniques to portray his character’s warped nature). But with Davis ..

It really could be, as Mary commented below, that he is trying to get the poor actress to break character. And how could we expect other than that he would use his usual disgusting and violent Drumph-like/”‘you can grab them by the pussy” sense of Curtis-granted entitlement to assault her as “Ned,” regardless of the intent of the writer and director.

Either way, what a horrifically mistaken choice in casting.

Lisa Richards: fifty years later, I am thinking of you and hoping you weren’t forced to endure PTSD after filming these scenes with Davis.

Comment left 29 August 2021 by “Cole” on “Episode 698: Sister Act,” Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn, 8 August 2015

When I mentally recast the many parts Roger Davis played on Dark Shadows, I divide them between two men who were background players in the show’s first months. I imagine Fredric Forrest playing the two characters with aliases, Peter Bradford (a.k.a. Jeff Clark) and Charles Delaware Tate (a.k.a. Harrison Monroe.) Forrest excelled both as a quietly intense man under pressure and as a sweet, goofy, overgrown kid. In the hands of an actor who, unlike Mr Davis, could project those qualities, those two unloved characters might both have become fan favorites. His other two parts, Ned Stuart and Dirk Wilkins, would have been perfect for Harvey Keitel, who is unsurpassed as a man who is agitated by a deep anger that he himself barely understands and that he certainly cannot explain to anyone else. Not that it’s any secret why Ned is angry at Chris, but when he takes a break from pawing at Sabrina’s face and breasts he handles her so roughly that he is obviously angry with her, and that is something he isn’t going to be giving any thought.

Mr Davis’ behavior wasn’t much better in episodes directed by Lela Swift and others, but it is little surprise director Henry Kaplan didn’t rein him in. Kaplan directed with a conductor’s baton, and actresses complain that he would jab them with it. When the person in charge has that light a regard for women’s personal space, it’s no wonder a creep like Mr Davis felt free to rub himself all over Ms Richards.

Episode 688: Why have you come back?

Actor Roger Davis rejoined the cast yesterday, after an absence of not nearly long enough. He has an interminable scene with Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid, during which he thrusts his arm onto the mantel immediately behind Hall, effectively putting his arm around her shoulders. She visibly flinches at this invasion of her personal space. When he exits she sighs “Oh, I thought we’d never get rid of him.” Frid says that he thought the same thing. They then get back into character and play out the scene in the script.

Roger Davis imposes himself on Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid.

Later, Kathryn Leigh Scott is on a set representing the woods, and she sees Mr Davis. She reacts with a shout of “Don’t come near me! Stay where you are!” When she demands to know “Why have you come back?,” he reminds her that the camera is on and he is playing a character named “Ned Stuart.” She goes into character and says her lines, keeping as much distance from him as the 4:3 aspect ratio of 1960s US television would allow.

The parts of the episode that are not ruined by Mr Davis’ odious presence tell a story about ghosts and werewolves. Frid and Hall play Barnabas Collins and Julia Hoffman, friends of werewolf Chris Jennings. The other day Barnabas and Chris dug up an unmarked grave and found that it contained the remains of a baby wearing an apotropaic device meant to ward off werewolves. We saw the ghost of Quentin Collins watching as they did so, a sad look on his face. Later, we learned that Quentin paid for the apotropaic device, proving that there was a werewolf in the area when he was alive and that he had some connection with the baby.

Strange and troubled boy David Collins is under Quentin’s influence. After Quentin imposes himself on him, David writes a story about a werewolf who tried to keep from hurting anyone by locking himself in a room, but who was let out of that room and killed by a hunter. Barnabas has indeed locked Chris in the secret room of the old Collins family mausoleum.

Julia finds the story and shows it to Barnabas. They fear that David has somehow learned of Chris’ secret. As Barnabas and Julia are aware, David is one of the few people who know about the secret room. And indeed, at the end of the episode, we see him about to open the panel that leads to it.

But that may not be the story’s whole meaning. Regular viewers know something that Julia and Barnabas do not. David and his friend, Chris’ nine year old sister Amy, first came into contact with Quentin when they made their way into a room hidden behind a wall in the long-deserted west wing of Collinwood. They found a decayed skeleton seated in a chair there, wearing Quentin’s clothes. Evidently Quentin was locked in that hidden room, and Amy and David let him out. Perhaps the story David wrote is a suggestion that Quentin was a werewolf, and that by letting him out he and Amy exposed him to hunters.

Episode 675: The best alibi you can have in this town

In #128, wisecracking waitress Maggie Evans opened a conversation in the diner at the Collinsport Inn with that old familiar ice-breaker, “Whaddaya hear from the morgue?” The show took us all the way to Phoenix, Arizona for a trip to that city’s morgue in #174, but it is only today we see the inside of Collinsport’s own morgue for the first time. Sheriff George Patterson brings heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard in to identify a body found on her property. Carolyn is shocked to find that it is her friend, Donna Friedlander.

Last night, Carolyn and Donna were in the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood with permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman and old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, who lives in the Old House on the same estate. Also in the room was Chris Jennings, a mysterious drifter who caught Carolyn’s fancy and who now lives in the caretaker’s cottage on the estate as her guest. Barnabas invited everyone to dinner at his house. The ladies delightedly accepted, but Chris begged off, saying he would have to leave immediately to keep an important business engagement in Bangor, Maine. Donna said that she was going home to Bangor and that she was ready to leave, and asked Chris for a ride. When he tried to squirm his way out of taking her, Barnabas looked on with smug self-satisfaction.

This morning in the morgue, Carolyn tells Sheriff Patterson that the last time she saw Donna, she was leaving with Chris. But she recoils from the implication. She cannot believe that Chris had anything to do with Donna’s death.

Carolyn does not know what Barnabas has figured out. Chris is a werewolf. When Barnabas told Julia that he had come to that conclusion, she was unconvinced. Barnabas’ dinner invitation was a ploy intended to elicit just the panicked reaction Chris did have. Barnabas’ look of triumph at Chris’ frantic attempts to ensure that he is alone on this night of the full Moon reflects his belief that he has been proved right.

Barnabas went to the cottage some time after the Moon rose, intending to use his silver-headed cane to take control of Chris in his werewolf form. But he delayed too long, and by the time he got there the cottage was vacant and Donna’s mangled corpse lay in the woods nearby.

We cut to the cottage, where we see a disheveled and bloodstained Chris come home. He has just had time to change his shirt and set some furniture right side up when Carolyn drops in. She has come to warn Chris that Sheriff Patterson is coming. The sheriff is right behind her. Carolyn leaves the two of them alone. Chris refuses to allow a search of the premises; when he spots Donna’s purse on his table, he throws a newspaper over it. The sheriff somehow fails to notice this, but takes Chris to his office for questioning.

In the drawing room, Barnabas and Julia are fretting over Donna’s death. Barnabas asks “Could we have stopped it?” He decides that they could not have, and that whatever sequence of events led to the killing must have been “Donna’s fault.” It is always fun to watch the scenes where Barnabas faces the horrific results his actions have on other people, strikes a noble pose while briefly considering the possibility that he may be partially responsible for them, and then agrees with Julia that it is pointless for him to blame himself. Julia and Barnabas’ self-exculpatory attitudes are so transparently absurd that you have to admire Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid for keeping straight faces while delivering their dialogue.

Meanwhile, Carolyn has called the Collins family lawyer, Richard Garner. Garner agrees to help Chris. We saw Garner and his son Frank a number of times in the first months of 1967, but he hasn’t been on screen since #246. He has only been mentioned a handful of times since then, most recently in #577. This is the last time his name will come up.

Back in the drawing room, Barnabas tells Julia that he can see “So many possibilities” for dealing with Chris’ problem. Frid’s delivery of this line made my wife, Mrs Acilius, shudder. She could hear the evil in his voice as he shows us Barnabas playing God.

Chris is in an interrogation room, telling Sheriff Patterson a series of mutually contradictory lies about what he did last night. The sheriff says he’s going to leave him alone for a few minutes so that he can come up with a more plausible story. You might think this was a sarcastic remark, but in this context it seems it might actually be sincere. Sheriff Patterson’s failure to notice Donna’s purse on Chris’ table is of a piece with the complete nonfeasance he has shown all along, and Vince O’Brien delivers the line so warmly it doesn’t sound like a joke. Moreover, Sheriff Patterson’s predecessor as Collinsport’s chief representative of law enforcement, Constable/ Sheriff Jonas Carter, capitulated to the Collins family’s directions to cover up a crime in his final appearance on the show, back in #32. Longtime viewers may suspect that Sheriff Patterson is as averse to the tough parts of his job as was Constable/ Sheriff Carter.

While Chris is alone in the interrogation room, he decides to tell Sheriff Patterson the truth when he comes back. He does in fact open his mouth and get the first few words of a confession out when the sheriff cuts him short. He says that Barnabas Collins called the office to tell him Chris was with him last night, and that Barnabas is “about the best alibi you can have in this town.” He shakes Chris’ hand and sends him on his way. Law enforcement characters on Dark Shadows are symbols of helplessness, and after that moment Sheriff Patterson has reached the zenith of that quality, achieving a measure of futility that cannot be surpassed. We never see him again.

Sheriff Patterson completes his quest. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris goes home and finds Barnabas waiting for him. Chris expresses his gratitude for the alibi Barnabas gave him, but keeps trying to get him to leave before the Moon rises. Barnabas tells him that when he leaves, Chris will leave with him. Barnabas closes the episode by telling him that he knows that he is not only Chris Jennings, but that “You are also the werewolf.”

This episode marks the final appearance not only of Sheriff Patterson, but also of Vince O’Brien. O’Brien joined the show in #148 as the second actor to play Lieutenant Dan Riley of the Maine State Police. O’Brien’s stolid manner suited the role of that ineffective investigator, but he was much less fun to watch than was the man who originated the part, the charming John Connell.

O’Brien took over as the second Sheriff Patterson in #328. He was again a step down from his predecessor; the first Sheriff Patterson was Dana Elcar, an extraordinary performer who always found a way to give the audience hope that his character was only playing dumb. Other actors filled in for O’Brien a couple of times, Angus Cairns in #341 and #342 and Alfred Sandor in #615, leading some fans to refer to “the Patterson brothers” (whose parents named all of their sons George) and others to speculate that for a time Collinsport allowed any man to be sheriff who was willing to change his name to “George Patterson.” Like O’Brien, Cairns and Sandor were accomplished professionals, but none could match Elcar’s gift for overcoming bad writing and keeping our attention focused on the sheriff.

Episode 672: And it was my mother’s voice

Today, everyone has the memory of a goldfish. Heiress Carolyn receives a telepathic message from her mother, the apparently-dead Liz, urging her to go home to the great house of Collinwood and stay inside in order to escape a terrible danger. A few minutes later, she has apparently forgotten the content of this message, as she goes back outside to check on Liz in her coffin.

During her brief stay in Collinwood, Carolyn talked with permanent houseguest Julia. Julia keeps telling her that Liz is dead and that the dead cannot communicate with the living, suggesting that she too has become a goldfish. Julia is a doctor, and Liz is entombed because she mistakenly declared her dead. She had made the same mistake about her several weeks before, and learned nothing from that experience. But she has also attended several séances, built two Frankenstein’s monsters, seen a number of ghosts, and spent a year and a half carrying on a one-sided romance with recovering vampire Barnabas. She also knows that in #592 and #593, Carolyn herself died and came back to life. So it is bizarre that she goes on about the finality of death and the impossibility of communication between the living and the dead.

Carolyn goes back to her mother’s crypt and is attacked by a werewolf. Liz knew she would be buried alive, and so insisted her coffin be equipped with a button that would ring bells everyone at Collinwood could hear. While Carolyn is confronting the werewolf, Liz overcomes her paralysis sufficiently to push this button. That brings Barnabas and Julia.

The werewolf paused in his attack on Carolyn when he saw her silver bracelet; that gave Julia and Barnabas time to arrive while Carolyn was still alive. Barnabas strikes him with the silver head of his cane, causing him to run off. When Carolyn tells of the werewolf’s fascination with the bracelet, Barnabas mentions that the head of the cane is also silver; he grows very thoughtful, apparently realizing that silver has a power over the werewolf. Yet later, when he goes to hunt for the werewolf, he takes a gun but nearly leaves the cane behind. He finally takes it, but his long hesitation shows that he, too, is suffering from goldfishism.

While still in the crypt, Julia had looked at Liz’ body and insisted she was dead. She wrote off the ringing of the bells as a coincidence, perhaps caused by some jostling during Carolyn’s encounter with the werewolf. Later, Liz gets out of the coffin and goes home to Collinwood. There, Julia, Barnabas, and Carolyn are astonished to see her. Julia examines her. After she finds that Liz has what is in Collinsport English called a “pulsebeat,” she seems willing to concede that she might be alive. She then starts giving orders which everyone willingly follows, because she is such a good doctor.

Liz remembers. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Liz is the one character whose brain seems to be in working order today. She can remember that her trouble started when her brother Roger’s wife Cassandra cast a spell on her. Barnabas and Julia know that Cassandra was in fact a wicked witch named Angelique, and that Barnabas has just returned from a trip back in time during which he destroyed Angelique. They assure her that Cassandra will never return. They can’t tell her why they are sure of this, because they, like the producers of Dark Shadows, have decided that Liz must never know what is really happening around her, lest she become an active participant in the plot. So all they can say is that they just know, and she is of course unconvinced.

It is a relief to wrap up the “Liz will be buried alive” storyline; that was dull from the beginning, and just got duller as it went. It didn’t help that we have seen Liz immobilized by depression twice before. This isn’t even the first time she has been rendered catatonic as the result of a curse placed by an undead blonde fire witch.

It’s also encouraging that Julia and Barnabas have met the werewolf and are engaged with him. They are the show’s chief protagonists, and nothing can really move without their involvement. Now that they are involved with the werewolf, we can stop spinning our wheels.

Episode 654: After you see what happens, you will never be the same again

One of the duller storylines in the first several months of Dark Shadows was the relationship between hardworking young fisherman Joe Haskell and flighty heiress Carolyn Collins Stoddard. Carolyn and Joe were thoroughly bored with each other before we ever saw them, and we were treated to scene after scene of them having nothing to say while they were out on dates. They only kept going out to humor reclusive matriarch Liz, who was both Carolyn’s mother and Joe’s employer.

Eventually Joe and Carolyn went their separate ways, and Joe struck up a much happier romance with Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town. There were too few obstacles between Joe and Maggie to make for exciting drama. There were long stretches when the show had established that they wanted to get married and couldn’t give us a single reason why they didn’t. Occasionally one of them would be caught up in the strange goings-on, and then we would see the other being all anguished and determined to get to the bottom of all this. As Dark Shadows‘ principal representatives of the working class of the village of Collinsport, Maggie and Joe were appealing when they went into that mode, suggesting a whole community of people who struggle to make sense of the inexplicable disasters that continually emanate from the big house on the hill.

Joe is on his way out of the show now. Actor Joel Crothers has taken a part on another soap, and will be leaving any day. In recent months, supernatural beings have cast spells on Joe and Maggie that have caused each to think the other had fallen out of love. Yesterday they met at her house. He told her he would be leaving town soon, probably never to return. They agreed to part as friends.

This scene of parting was cut short when a telephone call came summoning Maggie to the great house of Collinwood. Joe drove her there, and was downstairs when Liz offered Maggie a job as governess to the two children living there, strange and troubled boy David Collins and Joe’s orphaned cousin Amy Jennings. Maggie accepted the job, which Liz stipulated would start immediately. Joe drove back to her house to get the things she would need to stay the night.

Joe had only been in the Evans cottage a moment when a window burst open and a werewolf entered in a shower of broken glass. We open today with Joe fighting the werewolf. He manages to stab the werewolf with a pair of scissors. The werewolf does not appear to be gravely wounded, but he does run away.

The werewolf drops in on Joe. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Back at Collinwood, Maggie is worried that it is taking Joe so long to get her things. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins suggests that Joe might be having trouble finding the items on the list she made; she rules that out, saying that it was a very short list. She calls home. Joe picks up the telephone and immediately passes out. This alarms Maggie. She stays at Collinwood while Barnabas goes to the cottage to investigate.

Barnabas finds an unconscious, bloodied Joe in the midst of the wreckage strewn throughout the Evans cottage. Joe comes to, and resists Barnabas’ offer to call a doctor.

Shortly after, Barnabas enters Collinwood, Joe leaning heavily on his shoulder. Barnabas went to the Evans cottage alone, and he cannot possibly have carried Joe all the way back. Later, it will come up that Joe’s car is still at the cottage. So Barnabas must have learned to drive and acquired a car at some point in the last several months.

In the drawing room, Joe receives medical attention from permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. When Julia asks if he is ready to talk to the police, she is surprised to find that he hasn’t called them, isn’t going to call them, and doesn’t want anyone else to call them. She and Barnabas try to reason with him. When Julia points out that the werewolf might attack someone else tonight, Joe asks if it did any good when Liz saw the werewolf and called the sheriff. Julia looks down and, sounding like a chastened child, says “No.” Regular viewers know that calling the sheriff’s office never does any good in Collinsport, and Julia’s reaction is so much that of a person who is aware of this fact that I suspect the humor is intentional.

Barnabas and Julia reluctantly agree not to call the sheriff. They leave Joe alone with Maggie, who says she feels guilty that this terrible thing happened to him while he was doing her a favor. He says he’s just glad it didn’t happen to her. She says “We keep on hurting each other, and it just isn’t right!,” apparently expecting to finish the parting-of-the-ways scene that was interrupted yesterday. He is not interested. She notices that he is clutching a strip of fabric, and asks him what it is. He says that it is “nothing at all.”

The next day, we see mysterious drifter Chris Jennings in his apartment. We hear his thoughts in voiceover as he worries that he may have killed his cousin Joe the night before, when he was the werewolf. This does not imply that Chris remembers what he did in his lupine form; he knew that a pentagram had been seen on Joe’s face, and that this marks the werewolf’s next victim.

Chris goes to Collinwood to see Julia. He had hoped she would give him a sedative powerful enough to make him sleep through his time as the werewolf. Had he told her his real problem, she would likely have been very helpful, since she specializes in treating patients who are based on monsters from Universal Studios movies of the 1930s, but all she knew when he came to her was that he was a hobo demanding narcotics. It’s against Julia’s nature to deny anyone sedatives, so she did give him a few pills, but they didn’t help.

Chris sees Maggie. She tells Chris that she just left his sister Amy playing at Barnabas’ house. She explains that she is the governess now, a fact in which Chris feigns interest for almost five seconds. “Oh, that’s… that’s really great, that’ll be great for her” he says. He then tells Maggie he has been looking for Joe. When she indicates that Joe was attacked the night before, he grabs her by the arms so hard he hurts her and shouts his questions in her face.

As it happens, Joe is also looking for Chris. At nightfall, Chris returns home to find Joe waiting for him. Joe had brought the strip of fabric that Maggie had seen him holding at Collinwood and matched it to a gap torn in Chris’ shirt. He confronts Chris, who tries desperately to get him to leave. When he realizes he cannot get rid of Joe, he tells Joe where he keeps his gun, and tells him to use it “when it happens.” Joe sees Chris turn into the werewolf and does empty the revolver into his chest, but it only slows him down. As the episode ends, the werewolf is closing in on Joe.

In his posts about this episode and the preceding one, Danny Horn remarks on Maggie and Joe’s inability to have an extended breakup scene as a sign that Dark Shadows is very different from other soap operas, and on Maggie’s inability to get anyone interested in her new job as a sign that Dark Shadows has changed- “This is not that kind of show anymore,” her writes. I would go further, and say that they amount to a programmatic statement. The first 38 weeks of the show were all about the well-meaning Victoria Winters’ attempt to find her place as a governess; Maggie can’t get us to pay attention to her thoughts about the position for 38 seconds. Carolyn and Joe’s months-long relationship amounted to about one-fifth of a breakup scene, the part where the former lovers realize they’ve said everything they had to say but neither wants to be the first to leave the room. But Joe and Maggie no sooner start talking about the end of their far more substantial relationship than it is time to rush off and do battle with a werewolf. That’s what Dark Shadows is about now, and they want us to know it.

Maggie’s brief remark to Chris that she left Amy playing at Barnabas’ house will also strike longtime viewers as a programmatic statement. That house, the Old House on the estate, was introduced in #70 as a haunted ruin. David’s habit of sneaking into it caused the adults no end of concern, especially after Barnabas moved into it in #220. Barnabas was a vampire then. That was a secret, but everyone could understand that he did not want to look up and find David in his house. In those days, the governess would never have dreamed of leaving her charge to play in Barnabas’ house.

That Maggie is now the governess adds an extra charge to this moment. In May and June of 1967, Maggie was Barnabas’ victim and he held her prisoner in the Old House. Julia used her preternatural powers of hypnosis to erase Maggie’s recollection of that ordeal, but several times since the show has teased the idea that her memory might come back. When Maggie so blithely mentions that she left Amy at Barnabas’ house, it is clear to use that Dark Shadows has no further plans for its previous storylines about the place.

I was puzzled as to why Joe suspected that the strip he tore from the werewolf’s shirt would match Chris’. There is nothing at all distinctive about Chris’ clothing even in the full light of day, and in a few moments of pitched battle in a dimly lit room there is no way anyone would have recognized the werewolf’s clothes as the ones Joe had seen Chris wearing earlier that evening. I think it would have been better if, when Joe saw Chris in his room in yesterday’s episode, Chris had spilled some brightly colored fluid or powder on his shirt. He could easily have done that, it is a small room and the two of them were both very upset. Joe could then have recognized the smudge during the fight, and that would have explained why he thought that it was his cousin under the fur.

Episode 651: The tomb is ready, and I am ready

Mysterious drifter Chris Jennings telephones the great house of Collinwood. Old world gentleman Barnabas Collins answers. Chris asks to speak to permanent houseguest Julia Hoffman, MD. Barnabas tells him Julia is busy with a patient, and Chris says that it is extremely urgent Julia call him back the moment she is free.

Julia comes downstairs. She had been tending to matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Liz is mentally ill. She is deeply depressed and fixated on the idea that she will soon be buried alive. Barnabas starts talking about the witch whose spell started Liz’ illness; Julia points out that the origin doesn’t really matter. Indeed it does not. Liz’ condition is quite logical when we realize that she has been exposed to a long series of traumatic events of supernatural character. Of course she feels helpless- her world really does not make rational sense, and there really are forces beyond her control that are determined to bring misery to her and those she loves. And of course she is preoccupied with death- she is surrounded, not only by people in mortal jeopardy, but also by figures who are at once dead and alive. Unknown to her, Barnabas is one of these- he died in the 1790s, became a vampire, and was restored to humanity less than a year ago. The story of Liz’ depression is not really a tale of the supernatural, but of a person responding to her environment in a perfectly natural way.

Liz’ depression is not exactly a fun story, and the show hadn’t done anything with it for months. We might have hoped it was all over. What has brought it back is the disappearance of well-meaning governess Victoria Winters. The other day, Vicki embraced her husband, an unpleasant man known variously as Peter and Jeff, and vanished into thin air as Barnabas and Liz watched. She and Peter/ Jeff were traveling back in time to the 1790s, never to return. Liz was very close to Vicki; the show spent its first year hinting heavily that she was Vicki’s biological mother, though they never got round to saying so explicitly or telling us anything about Vicki’s father. Now that Vicki is gone, Liz is inconsolable.

That is the in-universe explanation for Liz’ trouble. There are two real-world reasons. First, Joan Bennett was going away for a few weeks to do a play in Chicago, and the show needed to explain why Liz wasn’t going to be around when so much of the action was taking place in her house. Second, the key figure in both of the ongoing storylines is Chris’ eleven year old sister Amy, who is staying at Collinwood. Barnabas is the show’s chief protagonist, and so far he does not have any particular connection to either of those stories. Plunging Liz into a paralyzing depression completes the task they started by sending her brother Roger on a business trip overseas. It means that Barnabas has a reason to camp out in the main house and act as a father figure to Amy.

Barnabas had a vague notion about a romance with Vicki, though he did almost nothing to develop such a relationship. His basic feeling towards her seems to have been that he might want her someday, and so he reacted with petulant anger to any person or event that made her unavailable to him. Thinking about Vicki’s departure with Peter/ Jeff, he spends several minutes pouting while Julia tries gently to reason with him.

Barnabas is very upset that Vicki was so inconsiderate as to move on with her life when he might someday have wanted her. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

At the end of his tantrum, Barnabas declares that he and Julia should go back upstairs and talk with Liz. As they are going, he sees the telephone and says “Oh. By the way, Chris Jennings called. He said it was urgent.” It’s even funnier that Barnabas remembers this call so late in the scene than it would be if he had forgotten it altogether. Chris may use words like “emergency” and “extremely urgent,” but in Barnabas’ world there is only one truly urgent matter, and that is whatever his feelings are at the moment.

Vampires are metaphors for extreme selfishness. Barnabas may not be a vampire anymore, but he is still very selfish. But perhaps is attitude towards Vicki is not so unsympathetic as I have made it out to be. When he was still under his curse, he thought he might be able to remake Vicki as an eighteenth century woman, then turn her into a vampire and take her as his bride. Vicki did indeed have an attachment to that era, so much so that she traveled back in time to the 1790s. And when he became human again, Barnabas was immediately embroiled with a succession of witches and monsters, to none of whom did he want to expose Vicki. He wanted to clear them out of the way so his life could start, and once it did he would be free to approach her. But her life was already underway, and of course his was too. The nemeses Barnabas and Julia fought together throughout 1968 are gone now, but so is Vicki, and it is the two of them who are alone together.

The other day, Chris dropped by to ask Julia for sedatives. She was unimpressed with his drug-seeking behavior, and so when Barnabas tells her about Chris’ call she says that he can wait. What she does not know is that Chris is a werewolf, and he was hoping that strong enough pills could knock him out throughout the night of the full moon.

Chris and Amy’s cousin Joe Haskell has been trying to fill in for Chris in the big brother role. He and Amy have gone to the movies, and we see them on their way back to the great house, looking at the moon. Amy tells Joe that she is terribly afraid of the moon, for reasons she can’t explain. Joe asks if she really saw a pentagram on his face in #648; she confirms that she did. Joe knows that someone else saw it too, visiting medium Janet Findley. He also knows that when he told Chris about it he was terribly upset. Neither Joe nor Amy knows what Chris and Madame Findley knew, that it is the sign that he will be the werewolf’s next victim.

Amy is alone in the foyer of the great house when Liz comes down the stairs, apparently in a trance. She does not respond when Amy calls out to her, but walks out into the night. Amy is standing in the open doorway, watching her, when Barnabas comes and asks what she is doing. She tells Barnabas what happened. He tells her to go to bed; she refuses. He then decides it will be good enough if she waits in the drawing room until he brings Liz back. She goes to the drawing room, but when he goes off to tell Julia what has happened she slips out to look for Liz. Barnabas learns that she has left when Julia, whom he has sent to sit with her, reports that she is not in the drawing room.

Barnabas is out looking for Liz and Amy when Chris comes to Collinwood. He is upset that Julia did not call him back; she is skeptical of him. He tries to give a reasonable-sounding explanation; if only he knew of her background treating vampires and Frankensteins, he would realize that he has everything to gain by telling her the truth. She finally gives him a bottle of sleeping pills, along with a wary look and an injunction to use the pills only as directed.

Liz goes to the old Collins family mausoleum. Barnabas’ parents and sister are buried there, and he was himself trapped there for 172 years when he was a vampire. She thinks of it now as her tomb, and tells herself that she is ready to be buried there now. She collapses. Amy finds her, fears that she is dead, and cries out. Her voice brings Barnabas, who tells Amy that Liz is alive. He also says that they must get her back to the house at once. Barnabas puts his arms under Liz’ left side, Amy puts hers under her right, and they lift her. This brief glimpse of the two of them working together goes a long way towards establishing Barnabas’ closeness to Amy.

I’ve altered the saturation and exposure a bit in this still. Though the original is darker and the fog machine was working overtime, in the moving image you can see what Amy is doing clearly enough.

Joe pays another visit to Chris’ room. Chris has taken a bunch of sleeping pills from the bottle Julia gave him. Joe scolds Chris for his failure to visit Amy. Chris knows that he could transform at any time, and is desperate to get Joe to leave. Joe does leave. Chris goes to bed. He falls asleep. The camera pans to his hand, which has already become a werewolf’s paw.

Episode 640: Stay for another séance

Eleven year old Amy Jennings and her big brother Chris joined the show recently, and they are the stars today. Amy has discovered the ghost of Quentin Collins, who haunts a room in the long deserted west wing of the great house of Collinwood. Strange and troubled boy David Collins is rather miffed that Quentin prefers Amy’s company to his- after all, “Quentin Collins is my ancestor,” not Amy’s. They hold a séance in an attempt to bring Quentin to them. David has only participated in one séance, back in #186, when he went into a trance and gave voice to the late David Radcliffe, a boy who died (by fire!) in 1867. So he hasn’t had a chance to catch on that séances on Dark Shadows require a minimum of three people- the first to begin the ceremony and bark orders at everyone else, the second to go into the trance and act as medium, and the third to grow alarmed, try to wake the medium from the trance, and be sternly rebuked by the first. Since David and Amy have no third person, they have no chance of contacting Quentin.

Instead, a shadowy figure appears in the doorway. She is well-meaning governess Vicki, or a rough approximation thereof. David Collins’ scenes with Vicki had been the highlight of the first year of Dark Shadows, not because of the writing or the direction but entirely due to the rapport between actors David Henesy and Alexandra Moltke Isles. A few weeks ago Mrs Isles left the show, and Vicki was recast. Her brief appearance is Mr Henesy’s first scene with the new actress, Betsy Durkin. They can’t recreate his chemistry with Mrs Isles, and Vicki ran out of story long ago. As a result, the scene sounds a discordant note for longtime viewers, reminding us that Miss Durkin, whatever her talents, is here nothing more than a fake Shemp taking up screen time.

Unknown to the other characters, Chris is a werewolf. Chris accepts an offer from the Collins family to host Amy at Collinwood while he deals with his mysterious problems; in gratitude, he takes heiress Carolyn for a drink at the Blue Whale tavern. While there, he sees a pentagram on the barmaid’s face and hurriedly excuses himself. Later, he transforms into his lupine shape and returns to the barroom, not through the door this time but through the window. He kills the barmaid.

The werewolf drops in to the bar. Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The barmaid appears only in this episode; she doesn’t even get a name. But we see her face in closeup often enough that she feels like a person. Even more importantly, she is wearing the same wig that Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, wore in her first four episodes (#1, #3, #7, and #12.) Since Maggie was also a server, working the counter at the diner in the Collinsport Inn, this wig tells longtime viewers that the werewolf’s victim could just as easily have been Maggie, one of everyone’s favorite characters.

Don Briscoe played Chris in his human phase, Alex Stevens as the werewolf. Stevens was credited not as an actor, but as “Stunt Coordinator.” Yet today, his credit card appears in between Briscoe’s and that of Carol Ann Lewis, who was cast as the luckless barmaid. Some of the original audience may have caught on that Stevens was the man in the character makeup, but others who noticed the odd billing order would have chalked it up as another of the show’s frequent imperfections.

Episode 632: A new mate

Two arcs overlap today. Suave warlock Nicholas Blair is in one that is coming to its end, while mysterious drifter Chris Jennings is in one that is beginning.

The fansites I consult when I write these posts vary in how much detail they give about what happens in the episodes. At one pole is John and Christine Scoleri’s Dark Shadows Before I Die, which gives detailed summaries of every plot point, usually illustrating each with at least one screenshot. Their post about this one is no exception.

At the other pole is Patrick McCray and Wallace McBride’s Dark Shadows Daybook. They typically present a brief essay about one key point in an episode. Halfway between the two is Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day, which occasionally drifts towards one or the other of those extremes and occasionally disregards the episode altogether to focus on some other Dark Shadows related topic, but which as a rule focuses on two or three points and weaves them together as it runs through an overview of the day’s narrative outline. It’s a sign of the thickness of today’s story that not only Danny’s post, but even Patrick’s, approaches a Scoleri-esque level of retelling.

Nicholas is under orders from his boss, Satan, to do two things in a very short time. He must sacrifice Maggie Evans, The Nicest Girl in Town, in a Black Mass. For this, he will be rewarded with Maggie’s eternal companionship in Hell. He doesn’t exactly seem happy about this, but he does drug Maggie, dress her up, and put her on an altar, so it seems like he’s going to comply.

Nicholas’ other task is to create a humanoid species entirely subject to the spiritual forces of darkness. This would seem like a big project, but he already has a start on it. A male Frankenstein’s monster known as Adam lives in his house, and at Nichol;as’ bidding Adam has coerced mad scientist Julia Hoffman and her friend, old world gentleman Barnabas Collins, to revive a female of the same breed known as Eve. As their names suggest, Adam and Eve are to be the parents of this new race of people.

Nicholas finds that Adam has grown reluctant. Eve needs reviving because Adam killed her the first time she was brought to life. She hated Adam and rebelled against Nicholas’ command that she mate with him, and at the end the big guy murdered her. Adam says that if Eve comes back to life with the same personality, he will kill her again. Nicholas tells Adam that the reason Eve was so hard to live with was that the woman who donated the “life force” Julia used to animate her was evil, and that the woman who takes that role when Eve is brought back to life will be very sweet and loving. When Adam is skeptical, Nicholas tells him that Maggie will donate the “life force.” Knowing Maggie, Adam finds this acceptable.

Nicholas doesn’t have time to recruit any other woman, since the experiment must take place tonight. It seems he must be telling Adam the truth about Maggie. Perhaps he will take her to Barnabas’ basement and tell Julia to hook her up to the machinery. But even before the end of the episode, when we see her on the altar, her throat apparently about to be cut, it puzzles returning viewers how this can be. Yesterday Barnabas forced Nicholas to promise he would not harm Maggie in any way, and said that he and Julia would not continue working to revive Eve unless he honored that promise. So it is a mystery how he can expect them to cooperate if he shows up with Maggie and tells them to subject her to a procedure that is more likely than not to kill her.

Meanwhile, Chris is visiting his little sister in the hospital. The hospital is Windcliff, a sanitarium about a hundred miles north of Collinsport; Julia is its nominal head. The sister was first mentioned in #627; her name was “Molly” then. It’s “Amy” now. There’s good precedent for such an identity change. When Julia was first mentioned in #242, she was simply “Dr Hoffman,” and she was “one of the best men in the field” of rare blood diseases. A change from “Molly” to “Amy” isn’t so drastic as that.

Amy reacts blankly to Chris. He offers her a box of paints. He tries to get her to say something in response; at length, she replies “Why didn’t you come before?” He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer to that, and she says “You did what you had to do. You brought me the present. You can go now.” He looks for words to express his wish that he could be with her, and all she hears is that he is about to go away again. He breaks down and promises to stay “right here in Collinsport.” Regular viewers will recognize that as a continuity error, but if we imagine it to be a slip on Chris’ part it is intriguing- he has been so far away for so long that any location in Maine seems like Collinsport. He repeats his promise, and finally she throws her arms around him, bursts into tears, and pleads with him to stay.

This is our introduction to Denise Nickerson. In the hands of another actress, Amy’s transition from suspecting Chris to embracing him could have seemed very pat indeed, but she is so utterly cold to him in the first part of the scene, so subtle in showing signs of hope in the middle of it, and so abrupt when time comes to warm up, that the whole thing plays as a real surprise. When we see that she has those skills, we can be confident that the show will be in good hands as long as Nickerson is part of the cast.

Nickerson and Don Briscoe play part of their scene behind an aquarium. We last saw that aquarium in #276. In that one, we were supposed to be uneasy about Windcliff and about Julia as its director. When we saw her feed the fish, it was a metaphor for her role as the mistress of a strange, self-contained little world whose inhabitants were at her mercy. Julia has been living on the estate of Collinwood for well over a year now, and the only member of Windcliff’s staff whom we see today is a nurse whose bit part was a prize given to beauty contest winner Bobbi Ann Woronko. So our attention is directed not to whoever is in charge of the place, but to Nickerson and Briscoe’s faces distorted in the water as the goldfish pass in front of them. This is rather a heavy-handed way of telling the audience that they are, each in their own way, as much prisoners as are the fish.

In the tank. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Chris has seen the weather report in the newspaper and realized that the moon will be full tonight. This alarms him. Back at the Collinsport Inn, he asks the innkeeper, whom longtime viewers met in #1 and know as Mr Wells, if he can change his room. He wants the most isolated room in the place. He also wants Mr Wells to lock the door from the outside and to leave the door closed no matter what he hears inside. Mr Wells is reluctant, but agrees to all of these conditions.

Even viewers who stumbled onto Dark Shadows never having heard of it would know from what we have seen between Maggie and Nicholas that it is a horror story. Those who have been to the movies will add Chris’ status as a mysterious drifter to his alarm at the full moon and his request to be locked up and left alone no matter what Mr Wells may hear and will come up with the irresistible conclusion that he is a werewolf. They will also be sure that Mr Wells will eventually decide the sounds coming from behind the door are so terrible he cannot leave Chris alone, and that when he unlocks it Chris will kill him. Of course this is exactly what does happen. Our last shot of Mr Wells shows his face streaked with red and blue markings. The red ones presumably signify blood, and the others signify that most TV sets in the USA in 1968 received only in black and white, so blue lines would look like bruises.

Blue and red. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.
The same shot in black and white.

Mr Wells, played by veteran character actor and future TV star Conrad Bain, had last appeared in #61. That was one of the longest gaps between appearances by a cast member, though the record belongs to Albert Hinckley, who like Bain appeared in #1. Hinckley, a train conductor in that one, will return playing a doctor in #868. That’s quite an extended absence from the show, but a remarkably short period to make it all the way through medical school, he must have been very bright.

Also in #1 was Alexandra Moltke Isles as well-meaning governess Victoria Winters; Mrs Isles left the show three days before this episode was taped. Victoria was Dark Shadows’ chief protagonist for its first year, and Mrs Isles’ presence in the cast was a powerful reminder of the show’s history even after the character was relegated to the sidelines of the action. Combining her departure with Mr Wells’ on-screen death, it might seem plausible that Maggie, another survivor from the first episode, might really die on Nicholas’ altar.